by John Buchan
Montrose held firmly to this conception of a law immutable and fundamental; it was the code to which both he and Charles appealed at their trials, and it moulded his view of sovereignty. With this adamantine sanction in the background, which no other power could change, he was compelled to think of a constitution as a thing of delicate balances, of authority as a commodity scrupulously weighed out and studiously limited, and of a central delegated sovereignty as inhering in a monarch rather than in any Parliament. National health, he maintained, depended, like bodily health, upon each member playing its own part without encroachment. The monarchy seemed to him the most vital part of a nicely adjusted mechanism, since upon its proper functioning the working of all other parts specially depended. He places the emphasis on the Crown, though he gives it no autocracy. He could not foresee that this delicate adjustment would end in stagnation, and that in a later age it would be necessary to aggrandize the power of one part in order to make the wheels revolve. It was difficult for any thinker of his time to accept the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, to which the Long Parliament tried to feel its way — the notion of the “law fundamental” forbade it; but it was doubly difficult for Montrose. For the Parliament which he knew was the Scots Parliament, with its bad traditions of incompetence and servility. It may be that Argyll had a vision of parliamentary government denied to his contemporaries, but it was a vision, for a sober survey of the facts seemed to render it impossible. A wise and impartial king might hold the balance between conflicting interests, but the Scots Parliament, swung alternately between Kirk and nobles, would, if unfettered, produce only despotism or anarchy.
The second matter in which Montrose is a man of his time, is his attitude towards what we call democracy. He believed that from the whole nation came the sanction of sovereignty, but he was not a democrat in the modern sense, for the common people in his day were scarcely conscious of political rights, and asked rather to be wisely protected than to be endowed with ill-understood duties. But, both in his theory and in his practice, he was more democratic than most of his generation. He held that the laws were the only safeguard of the plain man, the true monarch of which the king was but the creature. He saw that any disturbance of the equipoise in the distribution of public duties would not add to popular liberties, but, by increasing confusion, would augment the power of this or that oligarchical faction. He held — and what student of the period will dissent? — that the contemporary commons of Scotland were “more incapable of sovereignty than any other known.” The people, as a political force, did not come within the imagination of seventeenth-century Britain. “They care not what Government they live under,” said Haselrig, “so as they may plough and go to market.” The proletariat was as meaningless a thing to Cromwell and Vane as it was to Strafford and Clarendon, and the creed of the Leveller was as hateful to the Puritan as to the Cavalier. Indeed it may be said that the silent masses had more to gain from king than from Parliament, for it was the Crown which, in Star Chamber and Council, did its best to check enclosure, protect tenant right, and maintain wages. Montrose, with his doctrine of the organic unity of the State, and his constant appeal to the “mean people,” came nearer democracy, it may be argued, than most of his contemporaries.
The purpose of human government is to give to the citizen a free, a secure, and an ordered life. The means of effecting this purpose will vary from age to age and from nation to nation, but one essential will always remain — an effective central power “to unite and incorporate the members into one body politic that, with joint endeavour and abilities, they may the better advance the common good,” and this central power must spring from the goodwill of the people at large. Montrose found it in a constitutional monarchy such as he conceived it. “He who keeps watch and ward for freedom,” Coleridge has written, “has to guard against two enemies, the despotism of the few and the despotism of the many.” The second peril in Montrose’s day had not arisen, but the first was an ever-present menace, whether it took the form of an aristocratic or an ecclesiastical junta. The truth of his doctrine is not affected by the fact that Britain found a solution by other methods than those which he foreshadowed. The hope of a popular monarchy shipwrecked on the character of Charles, and a religious quarrel in which civil politics were fatally compromised. If Montrose did not foresee either modern parliamentaryism or modern democracy, he foresaw the principle which alone gives them value. They are but means to an end, and to-day, when parliamentary government has lost much of its glamour, and criticism is revealing as mere expedients certain democratic dogmas which once seemed eternal truths, we are being driven back again to the fundamentals.
Open Burke anywhere. “I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the representatives, but the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that the representatives are going to overleap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power.” It is Montrose’s defence, first for signing the National Covenant, and then for taking up arms against the Covenanters. “Here it says to an encroaching prerogative, ‘Your sceptre has its length, you cannot add a hair to your head or a gem to your crown but what an eternal law has given to it!’ Here it says to an overweening peerage, ‘Your pride finds banks that it cannot overflow.’ Here to a tumultuous and giddy people, ‘There is a bed to the raging sea.’” It is Montrose’s conception of constitutional law. Or again, “If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitutions which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executive power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the convention of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence — rights which are absolutely repugnant to it.” It is Montrose’s case against the encroachments of the Kirk. He saw that in a stable government the supreme power, while it must be delegated, cannot be made divisible. The Kirk was willing enough to accept the doctrine of popular sovereignty, but it did not grasp the inevitable conclusion — that the people cannot entrust this power to two conflicting authorities which may both claim to represent them. Church and State cannot rule conjointly over the same sphere and under the same sanctions. Montrose took the historical as opposed to the metaphysical view of human institutions, and, moreover, in his practical interpretation he curiously anticipated the modern attitude. He could have little part in an age when most men believed that kings and churches and aristocracies were mystically ordained of God.
* * * * *
1640-42
From his first entry into public life Montrose was at variance with the bulk of the Scottish nobility, but it seems certain that he began with a real enthusiasm for the Kirk, of which he was a ruling elder. So long as it stood for spiritual freedom he was its fervent champion, and this championship, as we have seen, led him occasionally into courses which were contrary to his political creed. He had a reverence for godliness, and from such a man as Alexander Henderson he differed with profound reluctance. His personal religion was the Calvinism of his age, but he had reached it, not by the rigid schedule of grim “experiences” laid down by the Scottish divines, but by the gentler Platonic method, whereby God reveals Himself insensibly through the riches of His world, and piety crowns like a flower the natural growth of mind and soul. He had the latitude of Hales or Chillingworth about inessentials, and his creed was that of the great saying of Symmachus: “Uno itinere non potest pervenire ad tam grande secretum.” His condemnation was reserved for those who forgot the spirit in the letter and made religion a thing of scholastic subtleties. His affinities were with men like the Cambridge Platonists, whose Calvinism was mellowed and warmed by the love of humanity and of all things true and beautiful. He would have agreed with Whichcote that Christ is magister vitæ non scholæ, and that he is “the best Christian w
hose heart beats with the truest pulse towards heaven, not he whose head spinneth out the finest cobwebs.” He had Whichcote’s stalwart respect for the freedom of the mind. When later he criticized the teaching of the Scottish divines, it was on the ground of their narrow legalism and their spiritual pride.
The event which compelled his final breach with the Kirk was its growing alliance, under Henderson’s leadership, with the Parliamentary party in England, of which the price was to be the establishment of Presbytery south of the Tweed. The policy, which culminated in the Solemn League and Covenant, is capable of defence from the point of view of the perplexed Scottish divines. The Kirk held that Presbytery was a jus divinum, and it had the mediæval belief in religious uniformity as the foundation of political unity. It had suffered grievously from prelatical encroachments, and the impetus for such encroachments had come from England; its liberties could only be safeguarded if England were brought to its own way of thinking. Moreover, the Counter-Reformation was making huge strides on the continent of Europe, and it could be resisted only if there were the closest unity among all the reformed Churches; and this seemed to involve the abolition of Anglican anomalies and the reshaping of English Protestantism according to the universal Protestant pattern.
A man like Henderson was too wise to believe that he could force Presbytery upon an unwilling England. “We do not presume,” he wrote, “to propose the government of the Church of Scotland as a pattern for the Church of England, we do only represent in all modesty these few considerations according to the trust committed to us.” The change must come willingly from within, and he believed that the greater part of the Anglican Church desired it. He was misled by his English correspondents; he did not — he could not — realize that the great bulk of the English people disliked Laud and the Anglican extremists, but were attached to a moderate episcopacy, that the Presbyterian majority in Parliament was not the English nation, that English Presbyterianism was very different from Scottish, and that even among the declared opponents of the king and the bishops there were many stalwart Erastians of the Selden type, who would not suffer an ecclesiastical discipline uncontrolled by the civil law. Had Henderson had this knowledge, it is certain that one who sought above all things the unity and peace of the two peoples would have refrained from a policy which was to be the fruitful mother of strife. But there were few ministers with Henderson’s sagacity. To most, the bringing of England into conformity with their own communion was a direct command of God, and they devoted themselves to the task with a fanatic missionary zeal. The new Covenant became a mystical compact with the Almighty, its acceptance the test of holiness, its rejection or breach a certain proof of damnation. It was to be attended by “the voice of harpers harping with their harps, which shall fill the whole island with melody and mirth.” Civil statesmanship disappears in such a mood, and all that remains is a frantic theocracy. The Kirk, whose spiritual rights had been threatened by Charles, was now, in the enthusiasm of a regained independence, proposing to encroach upon the sphere of secular government.
To Montrose, with his modern conception of the State, both Kirk and nobles seemed to be marching the straight road to anarchy. The National Covenant had been an assertion of unquestioned civil and religious liberties, a united nation, with a reverent acknowledgment of their Maker, recalling their king to the true doctrine of kingship. But, in the Solemn League now preparing, the Kirk had gone far beyond her lawful sphere. He knew the people of England, and realized that the acceptance by the English Parliament of Henderson’s scheme could only be a price paid for alliance in rebellion. His way and the Kirk’s had come to a sharp parting. The king, in spite of former blunders, was now constitutionally in the right, and if war came it was for Montrose, and for all lovers of law and liberty, to support the central power against anarchic usurpation. If he erred in his view of Charles’s character and aims, the error was justifiable, for in the past three years the king had appeared to yield all that the National Covenant had demanded, and to have assented to that historic constitutionalism which Argyll and the Kirk were now denying by word and deed.
The alternative, as Montrose saw it, was a theocracy on a feudal basis, an omnipotent Kirk and a free license to a corrupt and turbulent aristocracy, provided that aristocracy remained orthodox. How would the “mean people” of Scotland fare under such a régime? Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi. He looked around, and saw the wretchedness of their condition. Throughout all his writings and declarations there rings a note of pity for the common folk, who had to bear the brunt of their rulers’ folly. “Ye have oppressed the poor, and violently perverted judgment and justice” — so ran his last tremendous indictment. Public morals were at a low ebb; nor was there any revival of true spiritual life, such as had at other times attended a season of religious wars. The hungry sheep were fed with windy politics. Let us take one witness, the celebrated Mr. Robert Law, a stout Covenanter who was ejected from his church in 1662 after the Restoration. “From the year 1652,” he writes, “to the year 1660, there was great good done by the preaching of the Gospel in the west of Scotland, more than was observed to have been for twenty or thirty years before; a great many brought in to Christ Jesus by the saving work of conversion, which was occasioned through ministers preaching nothing all that time but the Gospel, and had left off to preach up parliaments, armies, leagues, resolutions, and remonstrances.” The use of the Lord’s Prayer was condemned by some zealots as being too much of a “set form.” Private meetings for devotion were discouraged as savouring of schism — a strange policy for a church which owned Livingstone and Samuel Rutherford. Religion was in danger of ceasing to be a quickening spirit, and of becoming a hortus siccus of withered pedantries. Of the Kirk now dominant in Scotland, Cromwell, after Dunbar, had certain truths to proclaim. “By your hard and subtle words,” he told the ministers, “you have begotten prejudice in those who do too much in matters of conscience — wherein every soul has to answer for itself to God — depend upon you. Your own guilt is too much for you to bear.... Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the Word of God, all that you say? I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. There may be a Covenant made with Death and Hell.”
1642
As his path became clearer before him, Montrose, after his fashion at a crisis in his life, was moved to one of his rare exercises in verse. He had much leisure during these months, and spent it at his house of Kincardine with his wife and his sons, of whom the eldest was now a boy of twelve. Thither came a pleasant company of neighbours and kinsfolk, Napiers, Erskines, and Stirlings, and the old hall by the Ruthven Water heard for the last time the sound of young voices and children’s play. At this period he must have written the lyric by which his name is best known in our literature. It is a love song, but it is addressed to the eyebrows of no mortal Sylvia. In his youth ladies had written him verses, but his marriage was the one romance of his life, and, in spite of the jealous inquisition of the Kirk, no affair of gallantry was ever linked with his name. In his ballad the ardour of the patriot is joined to the passion of the lover in singing of his mistress, Scotland, and what he will do for her if she trusts him. It breathes the same spirit as his “Discourse of Sovereignty,” a hatred of sectarian war, a plea for the unity which had long fled from his distracted land. Almost every metaphor is drawn from the language of contemporary politics, but that language is warmed and coloured by a passion of loyalty — to an ideal rather than to a person, for with Montrose, in Plato’s words, the quest of truth did not lack the warmth of desire.
“My dear and only love, I pray
That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part,
Which virtuous souls abhor,
And hold a Synod in thine heart,
I’ll never love thee more.
As Alexander I will reign,
And I will reign alone;
My thoughts did evermore disdain
A rival on my throne.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all.
. . . . .
And in the Empire of thine heart
Where I should solely be,
If others do pretend a part
Or dare to vie with me,
Or if Committees thou erect,
And go on such a score,
I’ll laugh and sing at thy neglect,
And never love thee more.
But if thou wilt prove faithful then,
And constant of thy word,
I’ll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword;
I’ll serve thee in such noble ways
Was never heard before;
I’ll crown and deck thee all with bays,
And love thee more and more.”
This is the song of a man who has at last found assurance, the confession of a soul which has a vision of a noble purpose, and holds no risk too high in its attainment.
II
Montrose was soon to be called to witness to his faith. Charles returned to London from Scotland in November 1641, to be confronted with the Grand Remonstrance, which demanded a government responsible to Parliament, and the summoning of an assembly of divines to settle the religious problem. On January 4, 1642, he was guilty of a supreme blunder when, on his queen’s advice, he attempted to enter the Commons and arrest the Five Members. Six days later he left London, to which he was not destined to return till he returned to die. The last hope of a peaceful settlement had gone, and both sides began the raising of armies — the Parliament by ordinances, and the king by commissions of array. On 23rd April Sir John Hotham shut the gates of Hull in Charles’s face, and civil war began. On 22nd August the royal standard was set up at Nottingham, and in that month and from that place the king wrote to Montrose:
